You Can Bet on Everything Now. What Could Go Wrong?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Question Everything — "You Can Bet on Everything Now. What Could Go Wrong?"
Host: Brian Reed
Guests: Danny Funt (author, journalist), June Lee (sports journalist), Kate Nibs (Wired), Sam Egan (producer), with a cameo from Chris Hayes
Date: April 23, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode investigates the explosive rise of online prediction markets—platforms where users can bet on everything from sports scores to political outcomes to whether a news anchor will say a certain word. Host Brian Reed and a panel of journalists and experts explore how these new forms of gambling are transforming journalism, news coverage, and society at large. The episode digs into the mechanics of these sites, legal loopholes, insider trading risks, partnerships with media organizations, and unsettling implications for trust in both media and institutions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The New World of Prediction Markets

• Opening Experiment (02:15): Brian Reed places a live bet on “prediction markets” (e.g., Kalshi, Polymarket), sites enabling wagers on almost any imaginable event, from TV show outcomes to global political leadership.

  • Notable quote:
    “What’s becoming clearer by the week is these seemingly trivial wagers...actually have major implications for the state of politics, information, even war.” (01:48, Brian Reed)

• Types of Bets:

  • “Mention markets”—wagering on what words a news anchor like Rachel Maddow will say on air (02:15–04:04).
  • Highly detailed prediction contracts, like events in global politics, weather, entertainment, and beyond (01:38).

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2. How These Markets Work — And Who Regulates Them

• Legal Gray Areas:

  • Kalshi claims its activity isn’t gambling, but the purchase of “binary futures contracts.”
  • Danny Funt: “The notion that what you just did is something other than gambling is so ridiculous.” (08:26, Danny Funt)
  • These companies are supervised by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than gaming regulators.
  • Onion futures are banned—but not Trump insult markets. (09:58, Kate Nibs)

• Insider Trading Risks:

  • Platforms create ripe grounds for exploitation by those with access to non-public information (e.g., TV tapings, pre-recorded interviews, military actions).
  • Brian Reed: “My producer Sam and I thought about this with the bet we just placed on what Rachel Maddow is going to say…he could call up his friends...and ask them just to take a peek at the scripts…” (12:41–13:43)
  • June Lee: “Insider trading is almost central to the utility and the business model of these platforms.” (14:35)

• Real-World Example:

  • A Polymarket bettor made $400K after wagering on Venezuelan president Maduro being ousted—just hours before the event occurred. (14:10–14:30)

• Market Manipulation:

  • Concerns that powerful players could shape public perception or even real-world outcomes by moving large sums in betting markets, which are now reported like polls by mainstream media. (17:19, Brian Reed)

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3. Media, Journalism, and Conflicts of Interest

• Mainstream Media Partnerships:

  • Outlets like CNN, CNBC, CBC, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox now incorporate prediction market data into editorial coverage (06:37, 22:03).
  • These partnerships introduce potential conflicts of interest, especially when outlets hold equity or get paid for customer acquisition.

• Opaque Relationships:

  • Kate Nibs: “The...details of the partnerships are pretty opaque right now…it’s hard to get them to speak openly about exactly what’s happening. So there are still like a lot of unanswered questions.” (22:27)
  • Danny Funt: “All the conflicts of interest that can come with that, that is definitely significant. It motivates CNBC to promote Kalshi excessively, to...shy away from covering the negative aspects…” (23:02)

• Bribery, Strong-arming, and Influence:

  • Reporters have received offers to promote betting platforms, sometimes apparently meant as subtle payoffs after negative coverage (19:09).
  • Gamblers have pressured journalists to adjust headlines or reporting to swing bet outcomes.
    • Kate Nibs: “They didn’t care about the truth. They wanted to win their bet...” (18:22)
    • June Lee: “Within two days [of a critical tweet], I got an email...saying, hey, we’re looking to sponsor your channel. Are you interested?” (19:46)

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4. Parallels to Sports Gambling: Worrying Precedents

• Legalization Wave:

  • Following the Supreme Court’s 2018 Murphy v. NCAA decision, sports betting exploded in the US—from $4.9 billion in bets pre-legalization to $167 billion last year (29:58–34:08).

• Athlete Impact & Scandals:

  • Rise of “prop bets” (performance-based wagers)—new opportunities for cheating, match-fixing, and extortion.
  • Jontay Porter Scandal: NBA player partners with gamblers to intentionally underperform for huge betting gains. (30:47–31:58)
    • “I saw a bet slip for more than a million bucks on just one bet.” (31:53, Danny Funt)
  • Athletes endure harassment when bettors lose: “...takes away some of the joy of playing sports because you do well and people are still mad at you.” (32:49, June Lee)

• Effects on Media Coverage:

  • June Lee: “Most people cannot talk frankly or report frankly about how gambling is changing sports...it might affect literally my paycheck and my job security.” (36:27)

• Wider Social Impacts:

  • Gambling lens now dominates media commentary—fans cheer for bets, not teams or human stories (35:50–38:14).
  • Gambling is marketed as a means of “escaping the Matrix”; appeals to financial desperation and masculine identity. (41:04, June Lee; 41:26, Sam Egan)
  • “People are being lured in with this promise of providing for their families and then...going up against Wall Street wizards—they don’t stand a chance.” (42:16, Kate Nibs)

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5. Broader Societal Dangers and Ethical Quandaries

• Feedback Loops & Reality Manipulation:

  • The convergence of money, markets, and news resolution means powerful interests could literally steer reality—or publics’ perception of it—by moving markets.
  • “We’re now entering a world where it’s not crazy to wonder if every politician is acting like a cheating basketball player or every judge a scheming referee.” (43:40, Brian Reed)

• Trust and Cynicism:

  • As betting scandals break, the integrity of sport and, by extension, other institutions is called into question.
    • June Lee: “If there’s this level of corruption within sports, people perceive that level of corruption in things that actually do change the course of the world.” (44:07)

• Hopeful Possibilities?:

  • The “wisdom of crowds” and some early research suggest these markets could, in theory, yield more accurate predictions than experts or polls.
    • “If we were trying to predict...how many troops should be in another country...it would be potentially a lot more insightful than if someone at the Pentagon had to make that call.” (24:03, Danny Funt)
    • Betting led climate change skeptics to shift their beliefs after wagering on—and profiting from—reality-based outcomes. (25:51–26:07)

• But...

  • The optimistic vision only works with meaningful regulation, transparency, and broad, fair participation—which the experts agree are not the current reality.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Regulation

  • “[Kalshi] successfully convinced a court that...they’re not a gambling site. They’re offering financial products…” (08:30, Brian Reed)
  • “You randomly can’t do anything about onion futures…there was this corrupt onion futures trader...in the 50s.” (09:58, Kate Nibs)

• On Insider Trading

  • “All of those people—anyone who was in the live audience or working on the show, or Chris himself—have this five or six hour window...where they can be insider traders…” (12:41, Brian Reed)
  • “The motto is: trade on what you know.” (15:07, Brian Reed quoting Kalshi’s slogan)

• Media Ethics

  • “Most people cannot talk frankly or report frankly about how gambling is changing sports…because it might affect literally my paycheck.” (36:27, June Lee)
  • “It motivates CNBC to promote Kalshi excessively…to shy away from covering the negative aspects.” (23:02, Danny Funt)

• On Athlete Experience

  • “It kind of takes away some of the joy of playing sports because you do well and people are still mad at you…People are, like, threatening their…kids and families.” (32:49, June Lee)

• Philosophical Take

  • “We are truly moving towards a world in which we can place wagers on the outcome of…anything. And there’s clearly an appetite for moving in that direction.” (42:16, Kate Nibs)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-------------|-------------------------------------------------------| | 00:56–04:06 | Introduction to prediction markets & live betting | | 06:37–08:30 | Prediction markets’ news partnerships, legality issues| | 10:17–14:30 | Regulation & insider trading examples | | 16:19–18:40 | Political influence & pressure on journalists | | 19:09–21:03 | Offers to journalists, conflicts of interest | | 23:26–26:32 | Prediction markets as potentially valuable data | | 29:58–34:08 | Sports gambling explosion & notable scandals | | 36:27–38:14 | How gambling affects sports media and journalism | | 41:04–43:40 | Cultural & psychological impacts of gambling | | 44:01–44:45 | Link between sports cynicism and political trust | | 45:11–46:14 | Results of the Maddow word-bet, professional gamblers |

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Conclusion & Tone

• The episode is lively, skeptical, and thought-provoking—punctuated with humor, disbelief, and frank admissions of confusion or worry from both host and guests.
• It blends investigative seriousness with conversational warmth, mixing firsthand reporting, sharp ethical questions, and personal anecdotes.

Closing Thought

The hosts and guests agree: prediction markets—untethered from meaningful oversight—bring both the dazzling promise of improved truth-seeking and the dark risks of new scams, systematic manipulation, and further erosion of trust in public institutions.

“We’re now entering a world where it’s not crazy to wonder if every politician is acting like a cheating basketball player or every judge a scheming referee.” — Brian Reed (43:40)

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Further Reading:

• Danny Funt’s book: Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling
• June Lee’s YouTube: I am Joon Lee
• Kate Nibs’s reporting at Wired

For more details, check the full responses from the betting platforms and news organizations at the Question Everything newsletter.

Transcript

[Brian Reed]

Something I'm always thinking about is the way that algorithms are often self reinforcing, giving us more of the content and news that we want to see, which isn't the most healthy way to take in information. Which is why I'm excited to be partnering with Ground News. Ground News shows you how the same story is being covered across the political spectrum so you can actually get the full picture and not just the one version that's being given to you. If you want to check it out, go to groundnews.com/ to get 40% off their unlimited vantage plan. Again, again, that's groundnews.comquestion. make sure you use our link so they know we sent you. So this is a bet I could make. Right now I'm hanging out with three reporters who cover gambling and I'm about to place a bet, an experimental online bet. One of the reporters is Danny Funt, who wrote the book Everybody Loses the Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling.

[Danny Funt]

What's your game of choice?

[June Lee]

Craps.

[Danny Funt]

Okay. Yeah.

[Brian Reed]

How about you?

[Danny Funt]

Probably blackjack if I'm at a casino.

[June Lee]

Okay.

[Danny Funt]

Just post up at a table.

[Brian Reed]

Yeah. Crap. My grandfather taught me craps like when I was a teenager and it's like the thing we did in common.

[June Lee]

Wow.

[Brian Reed]

Yeah. Got that connection for me. I like it a little too much. But the bets I have in front of me now on my laptop are totally different than Papa's Craps. I'm looking at something called a prediction market. These are new companies that have popped up. The two most well known right now are probably Kalshi and Polymarket, where you can basically place a wager on anything. What's going to be the top US Netflix show this week? You can bet on who will win Survivor Season 50, the Super Mario Galaxy movie, Rotten Tomatoes.

[June Lee]

Score.

[Brian Reed]

What's that going to be? These are all on the site Kalshee. That's what I'm on right now. You can place a wager on who's going to be the Democratic presidential nominee in two years, what the next unemployment numbers are going to be, oil prices, weather events, how long the government shutdown is going to last, which celebs are going to go to the Met gala. But what's becoming clearer by the week is that these seemingly trivial wagers about where Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are going to get married, about who's going to be on the Madden 27 video game cover, actually have major implications for the state of politics, information, even war. Today we have another after hours discussion at the Wine Shop, Biber and Bell.

[Danny Funt]

Where?

[Brian Reed]

Where we huddle periodically with reporters. For this conversation, three experts are gonna fill us in on what is going on with these fast growing betting sites that seem to be infiltrating all aspects of life. And to kick things off as research, of course, I went ahead and placed a bet since, you know, learn by doing. Right. What will Rachel Maddow say during her show tonight? This is a whole category on Kalshee betting on words. You think news anchors or politicians are gonna say. They're called mention markets. These are some of the words that you can bet on what she might say.

[Sam Egan]

We got Trump, prison, jail.

[Brian Reed]

Our question, everything. Producer Sam Egan read them.

[Sam Egan]

Tsa, oil, gas, gasoline, election, Hormuz, Russia, Cuba, Israel.

[Danny Funt]

So dumb.

[Brian Reed]

Each of these words has a percentage next to it on the website. That's what Kelshi has determined are the odds that Rachel Maddow will say each phrase and. And then it pays out accordingly. You can bet on her saying the phrase or on her not saying each phrase. There are also charts and graphs on the page that kind of make it look like investing. I'm trying to think about what happened in the news today that Maddow might talk about. I wanted to bet on something that would pay decently. Rachel Maddow saying Trump is a given, so doesn't pay very much. One of our guests, reporter Kate Nibs from Wired, makes a suggestion.

[Kate Nibs]

You know, there actually also was a breaking news story about insider trading on prediction markets. So she like, all right, let's do that.

[Brian Reed]

Let's do it. This is the word insider. And it's. And it's like 23% likelihood. So it'll pay better. Right? So how do I do this? I click this. I click yes on the word insider. Rachel Maddow is going to say the word insider during her show tonight. I put down 10 bucks. I'll get $42 if she says the word insider.

[June Lee]

Bad odds.

[Sam Egan]

It's good action.

[Brian Reed]

The CEO of Kalshi has claimed that the goal of his company is to monetize any difference of opinion. Kalshi, by the way, is the Arabic word for everything. This seems like a noteworthy change. Being able to suddenly wager money on any event in the world from your phone. At tonight's drinking session, I wanted to get these reporters who cover this closely to tell me, how do these markets work? What are the rules around them and what are the ways they're seeing that gambling is changing journalism, changing how the news is covered, and also just changing the news itself because it's starting to seem like bets might actually be influencing real events. From cabinet firings to missile strikes to the deposing of world leaders, a lot

[Kate Nibs]

of people think that we are truly moving towards a world in which we can place wagers on the outcome of

[Brian Reed]

anything from KCRW in placement theory. This is Question Everything I'm Brian Reed. I was so surprised by what I learned in this conversation. Stick around. I've been doing an update on my wardrobe lately for the spring and the summer and I've been turning to Quint's to do that. They have simple, comfortable, easy, good looking clothes and everything's a lot more affordable than similar brands, up to 80% less. I just got this matching chambray striped linen set pants and shirt. I've noticed it's particularly lightweight, breathable. It's kind of like pajamas. But I can also wear it out which is amazing. And I was wearing it around the house and both my wife and her friend who both work in the fashion industry said, I legitimately love this. This looks great on you. They were really into it, which made me feel great. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to Quince.com? for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Quince Q-U I N C E.com? for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com? I feel like this whole online gambling mania has snuck up on me. The other night I'm watching CNN and seeing data with a Kalshee logo all over the screen. Lots of news outlets are now striking deals with prediction market companies and integrating data from the markets into their coverage. Kind of like how they'd use polls, CNN but also the Wall Street Journal, Fox, the ap, even substack.

[Danny Funt]

Today our network CBC announced a multi year agreement with Kalshi which includes the use of Kalshi data for editorial purposes as well as commercial components.

[Brian Reed]

What are the prediction markets saying about where they see inflation going? Yeah, where does the Cauchy prediction market? Calce says IT processed over $22 billion in bets last year. It takes a fee on everyone and now these news organizations are somehow in on the action. How about the chance that Jefferies is the next House Speaker? Look at this. 3 months ago According to Calci Prediction Market it was a 66% chance. Now today we're talking about a 79% chance. I don't really understand how these partnerships with news orgs work. How exactly the money is changing hands. Seems like a whole new constellation of conflicts of interest, which is why I wanted to get these journalists together. They've all been investigating the rise of prediction markets and also gambling in sports, which really is a precursor to what's happening in news. The reporters who join me tonight are Danny Funt, who just had a book come out about sports betting, and he reports on the prediction markets, too.

[Danny Funt]

I have a whole chapter about the VIP side of the betting business.

[Brian Reed]

There's Jun Lee, a sports reporter who spent years at ESPN who's recently gone independent with a YouTube channel and has taken a very critical stance against gambling's influence on sports media.

[June Lee]

I'm in like a $200 fantasy baseball league.

[Sam Egan]

Oh, yeah, you're gambling. Yeah, you're gambling.

[Brian Reed]

And then Kate Nibs, who covers prediction markets for Wired. She reports a lot on attempts or failures to regulate these companies and the alleged insider trading that's happening in these markets.

[Kate Nibs]

If you spend any time on the phone with their comms teams going to tell you they don't place bets, you're purchasing a binary futures contract.

[Brian Reed]

The companies that run the prediction markets say their sites aren't gambling. You're investing in the outcome of an event. Yes, something will happen. No, something won't. But Danny says, don't be fooled.

[Danny Funt]

The notion that what you just did is something other than gambling is so ridiculous.

[Brian Reed]

Well, I didn't even know people were claiming it's not gambling. The day we recorded this, I saw a big CalShe ad in the subway that said in huge bold letters, Calshi Rule 4. We operate under US law. Which, you know, was very much a question I had. How is this legal? The answer is that Kalshee filed a lawsuit to argue that it should be legal and won. The company successfully convinced a court that they're not a gambling site. They're offering financial products, and so that's how they're treated. A federal agency, the Commodities Future Trading Commission, the cftc, is supposed to oversee all the trades on Kalshi, which seems nuts when you think about the mattow bet we just placed or this other bet we looked at. Which is which insulting nicknames you think President Trump is going to use before the end of the month. Again, my producer Sam did the honors.

[Sam Egan]

Whack Job, Low Energy, Crazy Bernie, Piggy Sloppidopoulos, Fat Slob, Pocahontas, Biden Crime Family, Comrade Kamala, Little Communist, Rocket Man, Tampon Tim.

[Brian Reed]

A federal regulator approved every one of those.

[Danny Funt]

Yeah, slopping dollars. Technically, they're all approved by the cftc, there's some ways of like streamlining that where it's sort of a rubber stamp for stuff they've done previously. But yeah.

[Brian Reed]

And what criteria are they approving these or not on? Like what are they not approving?

[Kate Nibs]

Well, you randomly can't do anything about onion futures.

[Brian Reed]

Why?

[Kate Nibs]

Because like in the 50s there was this corrupt onion futures trader who amassed a bunch of money by rigging the onion futures market. And so they, the federal government made a law specifically outlawing onion futures and it's still in effect. So you won't see anything about onions on here.

[Brian Reed]

There are also more serious rules.

[Kate Nibs]

This has been a whole big thing like you can't do death, war, assassination markets.

[Brian Reed]

The CFTC says prediction markets like Kalshi aren't supposed to offer trades on whether a human will be killed. There was a controversy over this last month when the US and Israel killed the Ayatollah of Iran in a missile strike. Kalshi had had a prediction market running on whether the Ayatollah would be quote out as Supreme Leader, which I guess was supposed to mean him leaving office or maybe getting ousted. But people were upset when they didn't get paid out after he was assassinated. The other thing that's wild about prediction markets, they've created a cornucopia of fresh opportunities for insider trading like gambling. These markets require a lot of people to lose so that a few people can win. Which means people who are better positioned with inside information can cheat. They're not supposed to. That's insider trading even on Kalshi. And the CFTC is meant to be regulating that. But I saw a video on TikTok not long ago that made me realize just how easy this is now that so many events are fair game for betting. It was from Chris Hayes, a colleague of Rachel Maddows at Ms. Now he had just left the CBS studios where he'd recorded a segment on the Late show with Stephen Colbert. If you didn't know, those interviews on late night TV are pre recorded. So Chris had gone and done the interview with Colbert around 5pm and it was going to run later that night.

[Chris Hayes]

As I'm walking out having done the interview in front of a live audience, several hundred people, I get this text from an old friend and colleague of mine, a guy named Bobby Allen, phenomenal reporter at NPR who covers tech, and he sends me this screenshot. Now, as you can see, this is a market that now exists on Kelchi for what I am going to say on Stephen Colbert. You can make bets there on like will I say Donald Trump, will I say affordability? Will I mention China or Russia?

[Brian Reed]

A mention market.

[Chris Hayes]

And I was sort of shocked by this. I didn't realize really that you can bet on something as niche and obscure as like what I say on Stephen Colbert. But there was a $22,000 market meaning like there's like $22,000 worth of bets happening on this. And of course the crazier thing about it to me was that this wasn't a future event. This had happened. We have recorded it. I, Stephen Colbert, the production staff and all the people in the building know what I said or didn't say.

[Brian Reed]

So all of those people, anyone who was in the live audience or working on the show or Chris himself have this five or six hour window basically where they can be insider traders and bet or pass information to someone else to bet on what words Chris is going to say when his pre recorded interview is broadcast later. Kelshi ended up featuring this bet on their homepage and it started ballooning to 800,000, then $900,000 like close to a

[Chris Hayes]

million dollar mark in on what I will say on Colbert when it has been pre recorded.

[Brian Reed]

It would be so easy to game this. My producer Sam and I thought about this with the bet we just placed on what Rachel Maddow is going to say on her show. Sam knows people who work at Ms. Now, people who are in the building while Maddow's show is being written and taped. He could theoretically call up his friends right now in the minutes before air and ask them just to take a peek at the scripts, tell us what words show up, what to bet on. If we were to call someone there and ask them are we doing something illegal?

[Kate Nibs]

Yeah.

[Danny Funt]

That is illegal for you and the msnow employee.

[Kate Nibs]

Yeah. And the crime is it's like the same thing as insider trading with the sec, like taking non public material information and benefiting from it. Will you get arrested? It's a totally separate question but technically it is illegal.

[June Lee]

One of the most recent examples is the invasion of Venezuela and when they got Nicolas Maduro and you know, brought him back to New York June, the

[Brian Reed]

sports reporter says an anonymous better on Polymarket, one of Kelshi's competitors put down $20,000 on Venezuelan President Maduro being out as the country's leader within a couple

[June Lee]

hours of that actually happening.

[Brian Reed]

Hours before that was even a thought

[June Lee]

before broken in the news. Yeah, someone had placed a lot of money into that bet.

[Brian Reed]

When the US captured Maduro, this mystery bettor made $400,000.

[June Lee]

Insider trading is almost central to the utility and the business model of these platforms.

[Brian Reed]

Wait, say more. Why?

[June Lee]

Because it's basically saying that people, they know something is going to happen, they're going to put hundreds of thousands of dollars into these prediction markets and that is a more accurate depiction or prediction of what is going to happen than whatever is coming out of the news media. The logic is that that is the most up to date, accurate version of information that anyone in the world can get.

[Brian Reed]

But you're saying it rests on the

[June Lee]

fact that people are insider trading.

[Brian Reed]

I will say Kalshi's motto, which I've noticed popping up every time I open the app, certainly seems like it's goading users into insider trading. The motto is trade on what? You know, when we asked Kalshi about this, a media rep named Jack Such wrote us a long email saying that the motto is not about insider trading, that they're trying to encourage experts to use their knowledge to make trades that will lead to more accurate markets and quote, keep the public better informed about current events. Jack says insider trading is incredibly rare on Kalshi. Less than.01% of activity on the site, and that the company works hard to prevent it because if people think of the market as a swamp of insiders, as he put it, people will stop trading. It's true that after that whole Chris Hayes situation, Kalshi did end mention markets on late night shows. Jack Such also stressed that Kalshi is not the same as their much less regulated competitor polymarket. Over on Polymarket, which is an offshore company, though Americans still use it by logging on through a vpn. Death and war markets are allowed. Polymarket runs on cryptocurrency, so there's a public ledger of every transaction involving each user's virtual crypto wallet. You can't see who owns the wallet, but you can see the shady bets.

[Kate Nibs]

There have been a ton of instances that have been documented of wallets that certainly seem like they're insider trading on US military actions, really suspicious activity. Like wallets that were just created before an Iran strike and there's $700,000 and then they never make another move again. There was a wallet that had MAGA in like the title of it and they were placing like huge bets on Iran war strikes.

[Brian Reed]

Getting it right.

[Kate Nibs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like right before there was any news published about it, people like Senator Chris Murphy has come out and just straight up said, I think members of the Trump staff are insider trading on the Iran war on polymarket.

[Brian Reed]

But there's been nothing proven yet?

[Kate Nibs]

No. And so far no one has been arrested and no one even seems to have been investigated, like the first criminal trial on insider trading. And prediction markets hasn't happened yet.

[Brian Reed]

Markets like this create a very disturbing opportunity for people in power to make decisions, take potentially life or death actions to win a bet or help someone win a bet. When you start gaming it out, you can picture all sorts of ways the prediction markets might begin shaping reality. You can imagine, for instance, a close political race where a super PAC starts plowing cash behind their candidate in a prediction market, which makes it seem like the candidates ahead, which the news channels would start reporting because they treat these markets like polls which could turn into real political momentum and affect the outcome of the election. You can also imagine new pressures on reporters. That's already starting to happen.

[Kate Nibs]

There's this wild story that happened recently with a Times of Israel reporter. He reported a fairly straightforward news story about a missile detonating and basically got death threats from polymarket betters who were trying to pressure him to change the wording of his news report.

[Brian Reed]

So these people had bet that there wouldn't be a missile attack on a

[Kate Nibs]

certain day or vice versa.

[Brian Reed]

Change the truth?

[Kate Nibs]

Basically, yeah. They didn't care about the truth. They wanted to win their bet. Trying to strong arm a news outlet to change their article because a lot of the geopolitical current events contracts resolve based on the outcome of like, reputable news sources.

[Brian Reed]

Okay.

[Kate Nibs]

And like, that just seems like it's gotta be the beginning of something terrible because we have all of these different events that people are wagering, like sometimes millions and millions of dollars on.

[Brian Reed]

Are there any stories that you've heard of or been able to report out of, like, individual journalists being bribed?

[Kate Nibs]

That is my dream story. So if anyone listening knows, please hit me up. It's gotta be happening.

[June Lee]

I feel like I can kind of speak to the bribing thing on a personal level because.

[Brian Reed]

Do tell. This is June, the YouTube sports reporter.

[June Lee]

So I launched an independent YouTube channel covering sports and culture, and gambling is one of the major topics that I cover. I've tweeted a lot about the way that sports gambling has changed the fan experience, how it's changed sports media and how. How people talk about sports and how people listen to podcasts about sports. And I had a tweet a couple months ago critiquing the CEO of Kalshi, who went on a CNBC program and basically insinuated that insider trading is kind of central to the platform's business Model. I tweeted that within two days, I got an email from an agency that represented Kalshi saying, hey, we're looking to sponsor your. Your YouTube channel. Are you interested?

[Brian Reed]

Really?

[June Lee]

Yes.

[Sam Egan]

Days.

[June Lee]

Days. And I've got multiple emails about this too.

[Brian Reed]

Wow.

[June Lee]

And different gambling platforms as well.

[Brian Reed]

What'd you say? Did you respond?

[June Lee]

I politely declined.

[Brian Reed]

What do you think their perception is when they reach out to you? Like, what's your kind of reading between the lines?

[June Lee]

I think they either are unwittingly, like, ignorant of my takes on gambling, that maybe that's kind of naive. Like, that is the most generous reading of it. You know, the least generous, most cynical reading of it is like, they saw my tweets and they were just like, hey, see if we can buy this person off.

[Danny Funt]

I've gotten that too.

[Brian Reed]

It's funny, you have a similar story, Danny.

[Danny Funt]

Just like a few days ago, someone was like, hey, because a big piece of customer acquisition for gambling sites is paying for referrals. The dollar figures are pretty bananas. You know, five or six hundred dollars per customer who clicks a link on some news site and then goes and signs up for a betting account. There's another business model where they give you a share of that person's future losses, sometimes as high as 45% of your net losses.

[Brian Reed]

What?

[June Lee]

Yeah.

[Sam Egan]

So if I post a link on my Instagram and I'm like, hey, guys, check out my FanDuel link. And then you, Danny, click on it and you bet $1,000 on the Raptors winning and they lose, I get $450?

[Brian Reed]

Theoretically, yep.

[Danny Funt]

That's not that uncommon.

[Brian Reed]

Just to clarify, Danny's not talking about Kalshee here. Kalshee says they don't profit off of or offer shares of their customers losses. And also that their outreach to June wasn't related to his comments about their CEO. Danny's offer came from a different sports betting site.

[Danny Funt]

And so someone who facilitates those deals was like, hey, your rinkydink dannyfund.com website, why don't you do that with us? And we'll give you a share of people who click on gambling links and go bet with us. They did the littlest amount of research they would. Now we're not the people they want to partner with.

[Kate Nibs]

I know.

[Brian Reed]

Have you been reached out to. No, no.

[Kate Nibs]

I'm a little offended.

[Brian Reed]

When was, like, the first deal with a news organization?

[Danny Funt]

I think it was last year, which was the first. It might have been Yahoo Finance and polymarket.

[Brian Reed]

Okay.

[Danny Funt]

And then soon after cnn, CNBC with

[Brian Reed]

Kalshi okay, and what are these deals? Like, what does a CNN partnership with Kalshi mean?

[Danny Funt]

That they'll exclusively reference Kalshi odds when they reference prediction market data and that they'll incorporate it in coverage in various ways. Or they have segments where they'll say, now we're going to go to the board and look at, you know, the price of a cabinet secretary being ousted based on Kalshi data.

[Brian Reed]

Like, are they making money on bets? Like, is CNN making money on bets in some way?

[Kate Nibs]

Yeah, I don't know. The, like, granular details of the partnerships are pretty opaque right now though. It's like hard to get them to speak openly about exactly what's happening. So there are still like a lot of unanswered questions.

[Danny Funt]

CNBC's is interesting. I don't know the specifics of this, but they do have a customer acquisition component which could resemble what we were talking about, where Kalshi is paying CNBC to get people to click on Kalshi links and go sign up for Kalshi.

[Kate Nibs]

CNBC also has equity in Kalshi.

[Danny Funt]

Yeah.

[Sam Egan]

Okay.

[Danny Funt]

All the conflicts of interest that can come with that, that is definitely significant. It motivates CNBC to promote Kalshi excessively, to make it sound like a way to win money, to shy away from covering the negative aspects, even if something as basic as how hard it is to win money for the average person or these insider trading dangers. On and on and on.

[Brian Reed]

I will say there are interesting arguments that these prediction markets can have real news value and if harnessed correctly, could help promote more accurate information about what's going on in the world.

[Danny Funt]

The whole, like, wisdom of crowds appeal of prediction markets is really powerful and compelling.

[Kate Nibs]

There is like this whole body of research that points to different ways that they're better than like experts or polling.

[Danny Funt]

I remember one that was like, if a crowd bets on like the weight of a cow or something and like they don't have to have any knowledge of like how heavy cows are and they tend like the number, like the aggregate number tends to be like exactly what the cow weighs.

[Kate Nibs]

Yeah. Better than experts.

[Danny Funt]

Cow experts, like a bovine expert somehow. And you distill all that opinions and information, it tends to be really spot on. So if we were trying to predict like how many troops should be in another country, if we had a prediction market on, like, what's the best number, it would be potentially a lot more insightful than if someone at the Pentagon had to make that call.

[Brian Reed]

I saw something in some of your reporting, Danny, that Markets where more money was wagered were more accurate.

[Danny Funt]

Is that right? So, like, if there's a high profile Senate race getting hundreds of millions of dollars in action, those numbers are a lot more valuable than something that's getting 20,000, like what Rachel Maddow will say.

[Brian Reed]

Got it. The adage, put your money where your mouth is.

[Danny Funt]

Yeah. The money is a reflection of a lot of people and a lot of people who have strong convictions. I don't know about y', all, but I already catch myself if I'm like, who's going to win best picture or who's up in the primary? I look at the prediction markets. I do think there's a case to be made that this could motivate people to be reading the news or following the news in ways that they're not. And that's a plus. There was a study done kind of investigating could this combat misinformation? And they took climate change skeptics and believers and they had them engage in prediction markets on short term measures of climate change, like rising ocean levels and extreme weather. And they found that the people who were climate change skeptics, if they won money betting on those proxies for climate change, very short term signs of climate change, like ocean levels going up, at the end of the study, they were more likely to now be accepting that climate change is real. So that's pretty promising.

[Brian Reed]

And is there any understanding what's happening there? Like they're then to make the bet, they're reading information to try and understand how much ocean levels might rise. And in doing that, and kind of like investing in it both financially and intellectually, they're coming to believe the facts more.

[Danny Funt]

Yeah. And then even beyond that, one of the neuroscientists who was conducting the study theorized to me that what makes you money tends to become part of your identity. So if you were making money by betting there are signs of climate change, you were more likely to then say, okay, I believe this, as opposed to just hearing an argument of why this is happening.

[Brian Reed]

So people came to believe in the reality of climate change. And the idea is people could become more invested literally in factual information in general, in staying up to date about the news, because it's making them money. Kalsh's rep wrote in his email to us, quote, social media, mainstream media, alternative media, polling and academia, really everything except prediction markets have incentive structures with human bias baked into them. Kalshi data, he said, is, quote, the only form of information in the world that is verifiably free of Bias. The ruthless efficiency of capitalism applied to the pursuit of truth. That's the argument in favor of prediction markets. Coming up, we look at sports gambling, which my guests argue has shown us the many downsides. How have you seen this affect athletes? Any stories?

[June Lee]

Oh, it's so bad. It is so bad.

[Brian Reed]

Hey everybody, it's Bryan here. I mentioned this on the show a little while ago, but I've been dealing with this pretty scary thing where somebody has been threatening me and my family online. One of the first things I thought when this happened was, oh man, I have got to reactivate my Delete Me account. There are all these data brokers out there and places where bad people might be able to access your information. That's where Delete me comes in. DeleteMe is an awesome service that goes out onto the Internet for you and removes personal information like your name, phone number and address from hundreds of websites. I'd set it up some years ago after I was doing a big investigative story for the New York Times and we were worried that we might get threats from that and I'm really regretful that I let it lapse. As soon as the threats started coming in, my wife and I signed back up and we received reports showing where Deleteme found our information and then they pulled it off of those sites. This is going to sound hyperbolic, but I literally do sleep better at night. Using Delete me. Get 20% off Delete me consumer plans when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com? and use promo code QUESTION at checkout, that's JoinDeleteMe.com? and Use the code question. We'll include this info in the show notes too. Hey everybody, I want to tell you about this sponsor of Question Everything. It's called Ground News. Their goal is to help you sort through headlines and news stories by understanding the source behind them and language that's being used. For instance, they have this split headlines feature. These are two headlines about the topic. This episode is about prediction markets. AOC slams Prediction Markets Latest move to curb insider trading. The other Poly Market publishes enhanced integrity rules as political pressure mounts. Can you guess which one of those is from a left leaning outlet versus which one's from the right? You'll have to go to Ground News to check it out. Ground News has a whole breakdown. It gives you percentages and explains the point of view, the factuality of each article. Ground News provides extra information on the story as well. Like with this one, they point out that Donald Trump Jr. Is an investor in Polymarket and a paid advisor to Kalshee. If you want to check it out, go to groundnews.com/ to get 40% off their unlimited vantage plan. Again, that's groundnews.comquestion. make sure you use our link so they know we sent you. If you want to get a sense of what the future might look like. With prediction markets now rocketing through the news industry, sports betting is a good place to look. It used to be that betting on sports was relatively hard to access. You had to go to a physical room in a handful of states or on a reservation or do it illegally. You could really only bet on things that were hard to influence, like the outcome of an entire football game or the total points scored. But since online sports gambling was legalized less than a decade ago, we've gone from Americans casting about $4.9 billion in sports bets to $167 billion last year. Nearly half of men aged 18 to 49 have an active online sportsbook account now. It's super widespread and it's also led to the rise of a species of bet, the prop bet, where you can wager on all sorts of little outcomes in a game, often tied to the performance of one player, like how many fouls someone will make or how many points they're going to score in the first quarter. And this has had a massive impact on sports. I know there's been a bunch of scandals kind of, you know, in sports in particular. What's the one that you think is like most illustrative of how it has changed sports and sports reporting?

[Danny Funt]

The Jontay Porter scandal.

[Brian Reed]

This is Danny, who just had that book come out about sports betting.

[Danny Funt]

So this was a.

[Brian Reed]

What's that?

[Danny Funt]

I wouldn't blame you for having no idea who that was. Even when he was playing a no name bench player on the Toronto Raptors who was making the league minimum, he had developed gambling debts for sports and other things. And these guys, gamblers, caught wind of that and they essentially extorted him. So he would say, I'm going to fake injuries and remove myself from games. And that way if you've taken the under on all of these props on my performance, those bets are guaranteed to hit and we'll make a lot of money together. And he was caught and convicted of colluding with gamblers to fix his player props. The fact that you could bet millions of dollars on Jontay Porter's stats in a random game in the middle of March is a total creation of this online legal betting era. It doesn't take A genius to realize it'd be so tempting to fix that.

[Brian Reed]

Like, that wasn't happening in the shadows

[June Lee]

before, because it could.

[Brian Reed]

Really? And how much money did they end up making in the scandal?

[Danny Funt]

I saw a bet slip for more than a million bucks on just one bet.

[Brian Reed]

And he made money, too.

[Danny Funt]

Yeah. But then he got convicted.

[Brian Reed]

The list of cheating schemes goes on and on. In fall of last year, two Cleveland Guardians pitchers were indicted for rigging bets by throwing specific pitches to help gamblers. Three former college basketball players at the University at Buffalo were just charged with cheating. It's alleged they were purposely underperforming in games, scoring fewer points, landing fewer rebounds, so that people they were in cahoots with could win the under. Dodgers pitcher Shohei Ohtani's interpreter is in prison now for stealing $17 million from him to pay off gambling debts. Jun says he feels for a lot of the athletes. How have you seen this affect athletes? And he starts so bad.

[June Lee]

It is so bad. I mean, I've gotten screenshots of DMs that athletes will get. Basically, like, regardless of what you do on the field now or the court, you're getting someone angry at you on social media. And so because someone has a bet

[Brian Reed]

in some direction, right?

[June Lee]

So even if you perform well, people are going to be pissed at you in some capacity. I mean, I've had some athletes tell. Tell me kind of anonymously, like on. On background. It kind of takes away some of the joy of playing sports because you do well and people are still mad at you. You know, people aren't cheering for you on the basis of, like, your team in the same way anymore. Like, oh, he pitched well. He helped my team win. It's like, well, he pitched well, and he helped me lose my bet. I'm going to, you know, curse out your girlfriend and call your girlfriend ugly. Or people are, like, threatening their. Their kids and families. Like, people have had to get. Call the police and get restraining orders.

[Brian Reed]

And what are the rules? Like, I just remember growing up, like, to gamble.

[Sam Egan]

Like.

[Brian Reed]

Like to gamble. Like, you had to go to Vegas, Atlantic City, or a reservation, and now

[Kate Nibs]

you just need phone.

[Brian Reed]

Yeah, like what? Like, how did that change?

[Danny Funt]

The, like, surface level answer is a 2018 Supreme Court decision.

[Brian Reed]

Denny's talking about Murphy v. National Collegiate athletic Association, a 2018 Supreme Court case where the state of New Jersey sought to strike down a federal law from 1992 that prevented sports gambling from taking place in all but four states. Nevada, Delaware, Oregon, and Montana. Jersey wanted in on the action, too. And the Court sided with New Jersey. It did away with the old restriction, federally unleashing sports betting across the country.

[Danny Funt]

I would say the thing that's more influential was four years before that, Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, wrote an op ed in the New York Times that came out in favor of legalization. And it was like a seismic event just because all of the other commissioners, including his predecessor and mentor David Stern, had been so anti gambling, calling it an evil and an existential threat and the deadliest possible thing that could happen to sports. That's something Bud Selig of Major League Baseball said right around then. And so when Adam Silver broke from that tradition and said this should be regulated, it set in motion a lot behind the scenes to convince the other leagues that they should embrace gambling. The NBA and the other leagues claim that legalizing gambling is good for the integrity of sports because it allows them to monitor betting activity. Specifically about catching illegal betting. You know, if it's happening in the black market, maybe it's harder to see betting trends. Whereas legal sportsbooks, we can look at that information in real time and say, oh, something strange is happening in this game. Let's investigate that or stop taking bets on it. Part of the problem with that argument of we're going to catch all this stuff now is the black market still exists. There's still tens of billions wagered through offshore sites and street buckies and stuff.

[Brian Reed]

June has an interesting perspective on all this. He was laid off from ESPN in 2023 for two years he couldn't work in sports reporting because of a non compete. And he says being out of the game for that stretch and specifically outside of the big networks, he was able to see the way gambling and the network's deals with betting companies. ESPN, for instance, has a big partnership with DraftKings was warping their coverage.

[June Lee]

The thing that sports media is predictive of that I think is going to happen in news media if things kind of continue to head down this path, is how much of sports media now frames conversations solely through the lens of gambling odds. In the past, people would talk about sports through the lens of like the human stories. And this team overcame XYZ in order to get here. And you know, we see this in the Olympics every year. Like this skier has a grandparent with cancer, that's gonna motivate them to go for gold.

[Brian Reed]

Cue Rocky music, right?

[June Lee]

Yeah, exactly. But I think what's changed about sports coverage in particular has been segments completely framed around who's favored and who's not. What are the odds of this team winning, this team losing. It's become central to the way that sports media works because of the amount of sports gambling sponsorships that exist in the industry. Most people cannot talk frankly or report frankly about how gambling is changing sports. You look at the way that sports media covered gambling scandals in the past. Specifically, I would look at the Tim Donaghy scandal in the 2000s where an NBA referee was caught fixing games. It became a major national news story covered across, you know, the major news programs and espn. And those stories aren't getting the same coverage today in terms of, like, the intensity of the reporting and just the quantity of reporting. And part of it is these leagues and companies are partnered with these gambling outlets. And I've heard personal testimony, you know, on background, you know, friends, whatever in the industry saying, like, I can't report on this topic because it might affect literally my paycheck and my job security. And they feel like they can't report it in the same way that they might have 10, 15 years ago. People don't get emotionally invested in their favorite teams anymore or their favorite players in the same way. Sometimes people will bet on their favorite team to lose so they can make money off their team losing. And if it's like, okay, well, if they lose, I make money. If they win, I'm happy, they're literally pricing, like, how much they're willing to lose in order to be happy.

[Kate Nibs]

I need to tell you something that's probably going to make your ears steam. So I went to this Kalshi research conference on Friday, and they were, like, presenting all of these, like, super financialized use cases for Kelshi. And one of the presentations was from this guy whose business is sports insurance, and he uses the prediction market contracts to hedge. And so he was like, for example, like a college team, if, like, they win the championship, have to pay their coach a bonus so the team will bet against itself to hedge against the financial downside of paying the coach a bonus.

[Brian Reed]

June, have you always been a sports fan, like, your whole life?

[June Lee]

Oh, totally, Yeah. I mean, it's. I moved to the United States when I was two months old, grew up in Boston in the 2000s, and became a part of the most obnoxious generation of sports fans ever. It was, like, impossible to not become a sports fan. And for me, it was like, the way I made friends at school, like, especially growing up in, like, a culturally Korean home. Like, it was the way I was able to talk to people and have things to talk about. Like, one of the reasons why I Love sports. Is that in theory, like, it's totally emotionally irrational to get invested in all of this, but you get caught up by the stories of these athletes. Like, for me, I think the biggest example of this is true 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombings. The Red Sox won the World Series that year with a team that, like, probably on paper was not good enough to win a World Series. But there was something that happened that entire season. Everyone was just, like, working for something bigger than just their own individual stats. They were trying to, like, kind of uplift the city and, like, really felt like Boston kind of came together in this, like, special way. And I think that when people put such a definitive, like, financial stake into something, I think you lose that, like, ineffable quality of being emotionally invested in something and caring about something without having to make money off of it. Yeah, I have some. Some nephews that are, like, a high school age, and I've had some conversations with some, you know, I'm 30 years old, some younger men. And one of the consistent themes is that it's often tied to their, like, ideas of masculinity. Like, I talked to someone who's a truck driver out in Long island, and the way that he thought about it was just like, I know sports. I know more about sports than the average person. This is a way for me to provide. And eventually he kind of got to a point where he was pulling out money out of his 401k to pay back the money that he was losing on sports betting. And so people feel as if, like, they're not enough, and that money is directly tied to their masculinity. And there's all this, like, identity stuff that I think is tied up into what making money off of sports almost represents.

[Sam Egan]

It's so adjacent to this idea that you, like, see circulated in the manosphere of, like, escaping the Matrix.

[Brian Reed]

Exactly.

[Sam Egan]

It's like, every day it gets harder and harder and harder to live in America. And, like, it's sort of positioned by these prominent influencers as a scam. Living a normal life, having a 9 to 5 is a scam. You're being used.

[June Lee]

You're a sucker.

[Sam Egan]

You're a sucker. And if you just gamble, right, you can get out of it quickly. You can get out of the Matrix.

[June Lee]

I think that's 100% spot on. Like, I think it's very much tied to the rise of this manosphere also.

[Danny Funt]

I mean, financial desperation isn't necessarily delusional. Like, there's good reason to feel trapped, and, like, you'll Never buy a house or pay off your student loans. And so I think a lot of this, like, get rich quick gambling appeals to that. It's why I was kind of blown away when Tarek Mansur, the CEO of Kalshi, they were doing this March Madness promotion where you'd win a billion dollars if you got every pick right.

[Kate Nibs]

Yeah.

[Danny Funt]

Which has never happened. The odds are like one in a quintillion or something.

[Brian Reed]

Very important fact check here. The odds of this are actually 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

[Danny Funt]

It's truly astronomical. And he was like, in his tweet about it, he was like, this will provide generational wealth for your family. You owe it to your grandchildren.

[Kate Nibs]

It is so bonkers because, like regular people don't make money at this. Like, it is not a good investment. It's a terrible investment strategy. There are people making money in prediction markets right now, but they're almost exclusively professional finance people. There are quant traders diving in and looking for arbitrage opportunities. And there are straight up financial institutions participating in these markets. And so your average, like they call them, click traders don't stand a chance, really. And so to hear that people are being lured in with this promise of providing for their families and then they're going up against like Wall street wizards, they don't stand a chance. One of the reasons why I felt like so strongly like I had to cover this as someone who covers like the future and where things are going and like changes in behaviors, is because I don't see this train stopping anytime soon. A lot of people think that we are truly moving towards a world in which we can place wagers on the outcome of, of anything. And there's clearly an appetite for moving in that direction. We are moving towards this space where wagering on literally every aspect of our lives is mainstream.

[Brian Reed]

We're now entering a world where it's not crazy to wonder if every politician is acting like a cheating basketball player or every judge a scheming reference.

[June Lee]

I think that's kind of the central issue for a lot of these sports leagues right now is that for fans, like, the whole point of caring about sports is like, you believe that this is real competition and it's not, you know, WWE wrestling, where the results are predetermined.

[Brian Reed]

And then when you have real scandals like you're talking about where athletes are sitting out early or shaving points or.

[June Lee]

And it makes people doubt all the, like big controversial moments of any game, like a referee makes a bad calling, now you're. Instead of like having a fun debate about it. You're. You're asking the question, was this fixed? And I think the way that this ties actually back to politics in some ways is like sports ostensibly doesn't change the direction and the future of the world. Right. But if there's this level of corruption within sports, people perceive that level of corruption in things that actually do change the course of the world. You have only more reason to be cynical about the stuff that actually does change people's lives. Whether it's elections, tax, tax codes, all that other stuff.

[Brian Reed]

All right, it's 10 o'. Clock. 10:05. Rachel Maddow's done?

[Sam Egan]

I think so. Based on. It's an hour long show, isn't it?

[Brian Reed]

Okay, so how do I check this? All right, let's go, Roo.

[Danny Funt]

Are you gonna donate your winnings to charity?

[June Lee]

Sure.

[Brian Reed]

Thanks for holding me accountable. How do I tell what happened here?

[June Lee]

Oh, it seems like it just closed.

[Brian Reed]

Oh, no contracts available now. Okay, this is complicated. Wait.

[Danny Funt]

Oh no.

[June Lee]

It's treating it like a stock, basically.

[Sam Egan]

I think you lost.

[June Lee]

Yeah, I think you lost.

[Brian Reed]

She didn't say insider. So if we'd gone with Cuba election Hormuz, we would have won?

[June Lee]

Yeah.

[Kate Nibs]

Damn.

[Brian Reed]

I don't know what to make of this loss. It's kind of anticlimactic. What did we learn?

[Sam Egan]

Schedzer felt like gambling.

[Kate Nibs]

This sounds like loser talk though, guys.

[June Lee]

Fair enough.

[Kate Nibs]

We were not equipped to win that. There are people who have these like transcription services that try to get the show like milliseconds before it airs and like do probability analysis based on Maddow's previous episodes.

[Brian Reed]

Like, there are people who actually do that?

[Kate Nibs]

Yeah. You're going against them.

[Brian Reed]

Oh, I didn't know there were like professionals working this bad about Rachel Maddow. I thought this was like some random thing. This is somebody's like, job.

[Kate Nibs]

Yeah, I mean, people have quit their jobs to do mention markets full time. I don't think you should do that.

[Brian Reed]

Noted. Fair enough. Fair enough. Thank you guys. Seriously, it was a pleasure. Thanks again to Danny Funt, June Lee and Kate Nibs. Denny's book is Everybody Loses the Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. June publishes Independent Sports Journalism. No Money from the Gambling Companies. Over on his YouTube channel, I am Joon Lee. That's I am J O O N L E E. And Kate writes at Wired, where she recently dug into the very timely question of how to file taxes on prediction market wins. I also want to mention we reached out to a bunch of outlets who've partnered with prediction markets. The ap, the Wall Street Journal and Fox didn't respond to our questions. Representatives for CNBC and CNN both told us that their Kalshi deals have no impact on their editorial independence, that the companies disclose the relationships with Kalshi to their audiences, and that they have rules in place to avoid conflicts of interest, like not allowing journalists to make trades in the prediction markets. They did not tell us the details of their agreements with Kalshi. Polymarket didn't respond to us. We're going to share all of Kelshi's response to our questions on our newsletter question everything.substack.com go subscribe thanks as always to Bibber and Bill Wine Shop in Brooklyn for letting us take over their space. Please tell your friends about our show, share this episode with them, and rate and review us. Today's show was produced by Sam Egan and Brendan Baker. It was edited by Jen Kinney. Robin Semion and I are the executive producers of Question Everything. Our team also includes Managing Editor Kevin Sullivan, producers Sophie cases and Zach St. Louis, contributing editor Neil Drumming, and Associate Producer Kevin Shepard. This episode was fact checked by Annika Robbins, mixing in sound design by Brendan Baker. Our music is by Matt McGinley, sound engineering by Gabe Kuroga. If you want to reach me, I'm @signalsalryhread45. That's B R I H R E E D45 on Signal or Brihread on Instagram. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seiple, Tejal Algemera, Natalie Hill and Jennifer Farrow. See you next time.

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